Web journal

Widget wonderland

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:05:00 +0000

Finally I have started the daunting process of moving all my blogs - this one, the Minim-Media news feed, One Creative Thing and the 16-week blog I sort-of kept in the last semester of my Grad. Dip. - over to WordPress. Blogger's been annoying me for quite a while now because it's got so incredibly slow and every post, no matter how short, takes 5 or more clicks of "This is taking longer than expected - do you want to wait?" just to get the wretched thing online. With the result that I haven't really been posting anywhere other than Vox for the last six months, and now that we've sorted out a UK host who has given us unlimited space, it's time.

And so the past two days I've been sorting out a template for One Creative Thing, because for the past year since it was created, it's been languishing in a prefab (but nice and clean) Blogger template and that, of course, is a case of "You can't take it with you when you go", so I got out my pen and watercolour pencils, and then Photoshop, and then Dreamweaver and made up a new design and coded it, and today I've been tweaking that code to turn it into a proper WordPress template. I'm rather pleased with the results, but I have to say, it's been very frustrating trying to add in widgets - everything seems to assume that you already know exactly how to get your widget into your page, and when I discovered that I needed my template to be "widget-aware", I was sent to this article on automattic.com as what seems to be the standard reference for "widgetising" a WordPress theme, but could I make head or tail of it? No. Part of the problem was that it sounds like they're widget developers themselves and I couldn't tell when they referenced a chunk of code whether that was for general widgets or their own widget (Answer: mostly it seems to be general), so, having figured it out, I thought I'd write my own description of how I did it, which hopefully might help others who are similarly bewildered.

You NEED a functions.php file. This is non-negotiable. You need this to put the code that will alert WordPress to the fact that you want widgets.
You can have either one or multiple widget-spots in your sidebar. It's no big deal to make multiple placeholders for them, so go to town and widget up your page like mad!

OK. So now that you know these two vital pieces of information, how do you go about it? Firstly, I am indebted to How to widget-enable WordPress Themes in 3 Easy Steps for actually making sense of everything.

functions.php

This is the file that contains functions specific to your site. What you need to do is to invoke the register_sidebar function to warn WordPress that you have a sidebar you want to add widget(s) to. You do this with:

 '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));
?>

(Note that this assumes you are not using WordPress's default markup which uses H2 for all sidebar headings and an unordered list for the sidebar content - if you have this sort of setup, have a look at the "3 Easy Steps" link above for the right code.

This seems fairly self-explanatory, and maybe it is for you, but alas, my brain did not work that way and it took some time to work out the following:

'before_widget' and 'after_widget' are for code that you want to be dynamically included around the widget - e.g. a div with a particular id. They do not indicate code that will show where the widget needs to go - that sits within the sidebar.php file itself
Similarly, 'before_title' and 'after_title' contain code that you want to go before/after the title that the widget will place in the page before its content. If you don't want a title but the widget is insisting, use '' in 'after_title'

If you plan on having more than one widget in your sidebar, you need to call register_sidebar as many times as you plan to have widgets on the page, each with its own name, so adjust as follows:

register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'sidebarname',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));

Note the addition of the 'name' attribute at the top of the array? That's the only difference. Just drop these one after the other, each with its own name (it may be best to make these a bit meaningful so you and anyone else who may use your theme can see what you intend to go in there. For maximum flexibility, the automattic.com article describes a good failsafe method that will show a static sidebar, should something go wrong with adding in your widgets).

Where do you want your widgets?

Once you've registered however many sidebar areas you need to cover the widgets you want (and more than one widget may go in a sidebar area, but you might want to specify different areas for specific purposes), you're going to have to specify those areas in the sidebar.php file itself.

In each place you want the widget to appear, you need to put in a call to the 'dynamic_sidebar' function, each one customised to the name of one of the widget areas you specified in your functions.php file, like so:

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
|| !dynamic_sidebar('sidebarname') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Note that if you put any code in between the first php tag and the second, it will be overwritten. Change the name of 'sidebarname' to be that of whichever widget you want in that space, the same as you did when registering that sidebar area in the functions.php file (that is, if you called it 'calendar_widget' in the functions.php file, you'll need to use ... !dynamic_sidebar('calendar_widget') in the sidebar.php file too.

Then in WordPress all you have to do (probably) is install your widget(s), activate them and set them for the spaces where you want them to appear. The names you gave each sidebar space in functions.php will appear on the widgets page, so you can easily determine which one you want where. Some widgets may require further tweaking of the PHP, but that is a topic for someone else to cover as I haven't yet played with any of those.

Steve Reich fest

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 07:54:00 +0000

A couple of weeks back Amazon sent me a parcel containing the most recent order from my summer bonus gift certificate from last year. Boy have I had a lot of mileage from that one - and still not finished!. Said parcel contained a book which I read avidly while at uni and haven't dipped into since, even though it should have joined the collection on my bookshelf a good long while ago: Steve Reich's Writings on Music. So I've been gradually reading my way through its various essays (and some in there that are new in this edition, or at least I don't remember them being in the University of Sydney's rather well-thumbed copy) and of course have now embarked upon a Reich binge, loading my phone's MP3 player up with The Desert Music and contemplating taking a step backwards and consciously writing a minimalist piece. I'm not terribly happy with the two pieces I'm working on at the moment - a new psalm (no. 47) which is just being incredibly hard work to progress and another Walt Whitman song which is just feeling a bit lost. The psalm I think will pull itself together eventually, but the Whitman song I think I might have to start again from scratch, so the prospect of trying something in a different style, that will take me away from these difficulties is really rather tempting. Now I just have to find the time to do it. I accidentally got myself employed in mid-August and between the 10-hour days and the 3-hour daily commute I've kind of been left with no time at all. I had a stab at taking the laptop into work and working on stuff on the tube and in my lunch-hour, but it's really too heavy for daily lugging, even though it is still pretty much the lightest laptop I could find for the specs. So I'm back to attempting to scribble things on bits of paper and hope that my interval-guesstimates aren't too far off. Aural was never my strong suit... Still, lots of Steve Reich to keep me happy even if my own work is being contrary, and come mid-October I'll be off work again, probably till January, so hoping to make some real progress then.

On the move

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:59:00 +0000

At last! Some momentum! This week being the first I've had entirely to myself since Christmas, I've really set to and started to apply myself to my work, and how wonderful it is to be working again, unfettered by anything other than door-to-door researchers and salesmen. I'm making very good progress on the psalm, which I think is likely to be finished this week, although I'm thinking of adding an organ part underneath it, but the vocal parts should be done at any rate. I've also started to think again about the set of Walt Whitman songs I started before I went to Australia and to start contemplating an accompaniment for the second one which till now has been merely a lonely tune. And this week I'm determined to iron out a couple of runkles in old pieces and get them all fixed up, and finish off the Satie arrangement which just lacks a part for live snare drum and a little finessing of the tape part then it can be laid out.

And all this in spite of a sudden overwhelming obsession with genealogy. I've been digging about in records of various sorts and disproving all sorts of family myths, which has been a bit shocking I think for my poor mama, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of it and find out where her family comes from. However, I'm not going near the family legend of my great-grandfather saving a maharajah from a rampaging tiger, or the one about him fixing the organ in malta by removing birds' nests and then accidentally agreeing to marry the local dignitary's daughter and the army having to spirit him out of the country so he wouldn't be assassinated for trying to back out of it. Those ones I think we need to keep!

For now, I'm putting the idea of a day-job on hold for a few weeks. Now that djelibeybi has a new job, things aren't looking quite so critical, and i think I can afford to at least take a month to really forge ahead. After that, I think I've decided to try a little freelance work rather than taking on a big bloaty permanent job that will have me tied down every day for goodness knows how long. But I think short-term contracts for a while will be good - ease me into it, hopefully help me to maintain a little compositional momentum, and if I need some extra time to work on something, I can just not take on any work for a week or two, or however long I need. It's not really a practical long-term plan, but I think it will suit my needs quite well for the moment. So if you're reading this and need any website coding done, get in touch!

In the past couple of weeks I've also been very pleased to have finally finished updating the design of this site. And no sooner had I done it than djeli's cousin impressed upon me the big fun that is PHP, and then I had to go and improve it right away, didn't I? :-) And he's right - huge fun to be had with PHP and I definitely want to play with this a bit more. I also think it might be exactly what I need to implement the tricky bit of my online Vexations project, which I also hope to get a move on with in the next few weeks. I guess AJAX will have to wait a little!

Mess & cleaning

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:53:00 +0000

My gosh, what a messed-up year it's been. Since I last posted, I've spent two months in Australia (we had to extend by a week cos the wisdom teeth to ages to get over and we just ran out of time to do everything) had about a month in which I just started to recuperate when my parents arrived in Europe, so then there was a week in Paris, which was fun and I finally got to go to the Centre Pompidou, 9 years after I first attempted to go, and we went out to Monet's garden in Giverny, which was beautiful. Then the parents came over here, and that was where things really went pear-shaped - it poured with rain pretty much the whole month they were here, not to mention my having caught a horrible bug on the Eurostar and inadvertently giving it to them. Ugh. But we still got to Cornwall (St Ives, Penzance for Mazey Day and the Eden Project all extremely cool), and did manage to get some fun stuff done too.

So now it's back to life as usual and facing the financial fallout of overseas travel, vastly expensive dental work and the associated costs of trying to show visitors a Good Time without bankrupting them.

Unfortunately I haven't achieved as much as I'd have liked while I've been off work - mostly because of the Australian hiatus and then guests and the month in between really wasn't long enough to build up any momentum. But this week I managed to send off a first draft of the Satie arrangement to its commissioner in America, so I hope he's not horrendously disappointed. It'll be good to get some feedback anyway - I think I've lived with it too long, got too close, and now I really don't know whether it's any good or not. It's certainly been challenging and interesting and way out of my comfort zone, but we'll see...

My next task is writing for choir - there've been a lot of choral opportunities floating about and I really want to take advantage of them. Most significantly is a commission from a friend in Sydney who conducts an amateur choir, for a carol for their Christmas concert. So I've got my father hard at work writing some words and then I'll need to pull the music together fairly quickly so they have time to rehearse. Looking forward to it though. I'm such a sucker for Christmas carols.

And now the time has come too for me to pull my CV together and start looking for a dayjob again. *sigh*. Sad, but necessary, and there sound like some fun jobs around at the moment to be applied for. I've been working hard on the redesign of minim-media.com/caitlinrowley.com (must buy that domain name) and am hoping for them to go live sometime in the next couple of weeks. caitlinrowley.com may be in a draft format because there's a lot to be done to get the content properly sorted and the architecture worked out to present all the info to best effect, but minim should be essentially sorted. I've been having a bunch of fun playing round with DOM-based DHTML in particular. I'd forgotten how much fun messing about with code is. I really missed it at PwC - didn't get nearly enough of it. The Notes dev stuff was cool, but not nearly so much as fiddling with a website front end and making it work in a bunch of different browsers. Loving my MacBook Pro more than ever, now I have websites to test - my testing suite is getting bigger every week. At the moment I'm testing in Windows using IE 6, Firefox 2, Opera 9.21 and the Safari for Windows Beta. I need to dig out my old-versions-of-IE link and sort out a Netscape version or two. Macside I'm testing with Safari 2 and Firefox 2 - need to do a bit more research about what other browsers are likely to be used on Macs that I should be testing for. So much fun! Having a little trouble using the FTP function of Dreamweaver via Parallels (cos I've got DW MX for Windows, so need to run it on Bootcamp and going via Parallels is definitely simpler than restarting the whole thing) but apart from that the whole setup is running bee-ootifully. Love it. Would recommend it to pretty much anyone. Go Mac!

Preparation

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:56:00 +0000

I'm about to go through another hiatus - we have to go to Australia for six weeks. Which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except that I'm having all four of my wisdom teeth removed while I'm there, which is miserable to contemplate and painful on the wallet. I'm taking the laptop (of course) but I'm not expecting to get any proper work done while I'm there - too much being on show and not enough silent time being on my own and tinkering with stuff, but I have grand plans nevertheless.

The first project is to redesign minim-media.com - this is long, long overdue, as I'm sure you can tell :-) It's time to ditch the "my-first-Dreamweaver-site" look and work up something a little sleeker, more modern, more standards-compliant.

The second project is to split out my personal composition bits and pieces (and this blog) into a separate site with its own domain name. I feel that minim-media has been suffering from crossed purposes in that it's trying to be my business site and my composition-promotion site all at once and I don't think it's managing it very well, so I'm going to split out the composition stuff and the articles and so on into a separate site, and leave minim-media as business-only. You'll still be able to order scores and things through minim, but hopefully this way will make things feel a little more flexible for anyone who just wants to ask about the music rather than buying it. One always hopes, of course, to make one's fortune selling scores and recordings online, but a more realistic approach is that if people are interested in playing my music, then i'm more interested in helping them to play it than in taking their money, so a different approach is needed from my side.

The third project is one I'm especially excited about. When I left Australia, I thought I'd be away for six months, so I recorded a small amount of my vinyl collection to minidisc and ripped a few essential CDs at the last minute which then turned out to be very poor quality rips and some of them (the pop music ones in particular) are so poor quality as to be virtually unlistenable. So while I am recuperating from having my teeth ripped from my skull, I plan to sit quietly in my parents' loungeroom surrounded by boxes and boxes of CDs, ripping them one by one to an external hard drive. I've been doing a little bit of research, and an open-source programme called Max seems to be getting the best reviews for sound quality. I'm currently running tests on an assortment of formats to see what gives me the best balance of sound quality and filesize. Unfortunately, there's the added ookness of whatever format I use needing to work in SonicStage, Sony's version of iTunes, because that's the only programme I can use to haul music across to my minidisc player. I've set up my old laptop (an ancient Sony Vaio) as a music server and will be entirely cleaning off and reinstalling the OS, so everything should be shiny and new. I can't wait to have my CD collection back at my fingertips - I've missed it so! At one point last year I even came close to rebuying bits of it. Right now I'm keenly looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Veljo Tormis, Arvo Pärt, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Elena Kats-Chernin for starters. It's going to be great.

I've already embarked on a related project, with the help of djelibeybi who is somewhat of a whizz with database applications - I'm moving my recordings database out of Paradox and into OpenOffice Base. I've heard mixed things about Base, but I'm keen to be able to dump my ancient copy of the WordPerfect suite because it's just too old and installs all sorts of rubbish on my hard disk that I then can't remove. Also, obviously, it's Windows-only and I'm barely using Windows at all any more and am keen to keep it that way. OpenOffice is proving very nice so far, and as my database requirements, all things considered, are pretty straightforward once the links between tables are sorted, I'm hoping it'll be OK. At the moment my challenge is working out how to design forms for it. Hoping to sort this one out today.

The composition is going well though. We went to the Sounds Expo music technology exhibition at Kensington Olympia the other day, which taught me some stuff and planted some ideas, and I started playing around a little with the musique concrète tutorial in the current issue of computer music magazine, which has now nicely set me back on the path to working on the Satie arrangement for America which has been a long time brewing but which finally seems to be pulling itself into shape. I'm hoping to have the first draft ready by the end of this week so it can stew over the next six weeks and be ready for some sort of preliminary airing when we get back from Australia. I'm just loving playing with Pro Tools again and everything's starting to come back to me a bit, although there's still a lot I need to learn how to do. Still, there's time enough to do that...

Sorted

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 22:28:00 +0000

At last, and after much tribulation, my new computer is pretty much set up. There've been many diversions and problems along the way - getting hold of Windows, trying to back things up, trying to sort out Parallels - but at last it seems I'm just about there. Pro Tools is working, Boot Camp is working, Windows is working. Parallels is working. OpenOffice is working. In short, pretty much everything is working - except Finale which doesn't want to play back without glitching in any variant of Windows I am running here. Which is a trifle annoying because I wanted to play about with Garritan Personal Orchestra, which comes with Finale, but which isn't supported for Mac in this version. But at least it works Macside, so it may end up being easiest to just ditch it for Windows and wait till I upgrade again to get GPO.

But I'm loving the Mac. And I'm loving the Mac OS. And Parallels is just amazing - being able to run Windows and have it integrated into the Mac OS is just incredible. And the Windows programmes I'm using within it all appear in the Mac Dock

So I hereby shamelessly declare myself a convert. From being a DOS girl, then a Windows girl, then a Microsoft-hating Windows girl, I am now a Mac girl, albeit one who revels in OS X's Unix roots and has made all the possible tweaks to get it to behave a bit more like Windows (right-clicks, scroll bar arrows top & bottom to start with).

I'm absolutely loving my freedom too. I started out really well and finished two pieces in January - the two-part inventions are all done now and just need laying out, and I wrote a song to a short poem by Walt Whitman which I think will be the first of a small group - perhaps about four. I haven't been doing quite so well in February, mostly because of hassles with finding and then sorting out the computer, but I spent a little time this afternoon hunting down other WW fragments to go with the first song, so hopefully everything will be back on track shortly.

Improvement

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:31:00 +0000

I am currently looking forward to an improvement in my quality of life. Next week I take delivery of a brand new computer. And not only a brand-new computer, but two brand-new operating systems. For I am shortly to be the owner of an Intel-based MacBook Pro, which will be running both Mac OS (Tiger) and Windows XP. I'll also be getting ProTools, which I'm sure will provide me with hours and hours of amusement... erm... solid work being done. Sorry. Slight slip there :-)

It's been amazingly stressful, working out the upgrade. ProTools is notoriously fussy and there are a bunch of sites listing all the tweaks you need to make to Windows in order just to get it to run. It's fussy about chipsets. It's fussy about the operating system. It's fussy about everything with the result that the makers' website lists only 6 Windows laptops that they recommend to run it (3 from Dell and 3 from HP if you're curious). They do test out specific chipsets and whatnot, so in theory you can find your own system that should work, but in practice, the Windows forum on their site is full of people saying "Why won't this work?" whereas the Mac forum is full of people saying "How do I get this cool effect?"

So I started off looking at the recommended machines, quickly ruled out HP as ludicrously expensive, then discovered that Carillon (who make their living producing systems for musicians and custom-tweak the OS before you even take delivery of it) produce a laptop which was about the same price as the Dell. So then it was Dell vs Carillon - which boiled down to "off-the-shelf generic machine possibly leading to problems setting up" vs "more expensive system but they'll ensure it works". Just as the Carillon was inching ahead (that "more expensive" bit was hard to overcome!), a friend emailed me saying he had just bought an Intel Mac and Windows XP ran lightning fast on it and why didn't I come on in, the water was fine. So I went and had a look at the Macs and... it all went from there. It was a bitter struggle, but in the end the MacBook Pro won, and it should be arriving early next week. I'll be running ProTools under the Mac OS, and pretty much everything else (to start with, anyway) under Windows XP - going to be quite the experiment!

Needless to say, my old laptop has been driving me nuts the past week - with the prospect of a new speedy machine on the way, the slowness has been unbearable, not to mention the crashing-five-times-a-day routine. I am looking forward to retiring it to the position of MP3-minder, beside the stereo.

But nevertheless, I have managed to get work done. The Satie arrangement is proceeding quite well, but a little bit stalled as I need ProTools to work on a tape part for it. I have also nearly finished a new song, to words by Walt Whitman, for tenor and piano, which I think will be part of a set of either four or six similar songs. It's been marvellous to be writing vocal music again. I really enjoy it. I think I might mostly work on songs for the next little bit.

One-upped

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:45:00 +0000

So I spent ages and ages babbling over this post. And today I find that Frank J. Oteri over on NewMusicBox has summed it up sooo succinctly, thus:

Music is just, well, too long. It takes too much time. And that time has to be focused and continuous. You can walk by a hundred paintings as fast as the crowds allow you to. You can read a book anywhere you want, put it down whenever you want, and pick it up again without losing the thread. (Well, most books—at least the ones that get on bestseller lists.) Admittedly, watching TV also requires time—everyone knows how much time it wastes, but very few people who watch TV are actually focused on it completely. If they were, they'd probably be able to quit the habit more easily.

Can I just say for about the 200th time what an awesome site NewMusicBox is?

But wait, there's more!

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:55:00 +0000

No, not steak knives. But two more musical examples on the scores and recordings page - one for Egg the First (listed under The Four-Egg Omelette) and one for Egg the Sixth.

Now off to write something new!

New sound file posted

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:56:00 +0000

To start off the changes I promised for this site, I've just recreated the sound file player - the source files of which have mysteriously disappeared from my computer - and have just posted the first sound file to go up on the list of scores for quite a while! This example is for (en)twine, my piece for harp which was written in 2004 - it's taken quite a while to get here, but at last it's done. The example is MIDI-generated, I'm afraid, but if I can ever get hold of a tame harpist to record it, it will be upgraded :-)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:52:00 +0000

It's been a while, eh? The past few months have really been just incredibly busy - and as a result, I've had pretty much nothing to say here, but all this will change in the very near future, because the result of all the busy-ness is that I have liberated myself from my day-job and will be working full-time on my composition for the next six months! Very excited about this, as I'm sure you can imagine. So much to do. First up is to really get to work on an arrangement of a Satie song that has been lurking for a while now, then maybe a choral piece. I've just about finished my set of two-part inventions too. I'll also be redesigning this site so it doesn't look quite so "my first Dreamweaver site" and bringing it up to date with all the latest usability and accessibility guidelines. I'm also hoping to establish a new site which will separate out my composition activity from the more businessy side of things. Then there's my article on Satie and Dada to finish researching and actually write and a ton of other stuff to be done too - busy busy busy!

Hope you had a very Merry Christmas and that 2007's looking as exciting for you as it is for me! :-D

Complimenting the bear on his ears

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 17:11:00 +0000

I started writing this post about a month and a half ago (18 June) and it's taken me an age to get my thoughts even vaguely in order, but at last I've managed it... sort of... erm... but be warned: gross generalisations up ahead and a fair bit of stream-of-consciousness waffle too!

I've been reading an article in frieze magazine about criticism, which has really made me think about the place of music in the world today. The article looks at literary, music (classical and pop - nice to see a distinction made!) and film criticism. Of course, the bit I was most interested in was the music, but it was good to read about the issues facing other arts too.

I suspect that, as an artist working in an economically and socially beleagured artform, I am often inadvertently resentful and envious of artists in other artforms who seem to have it easier - more interest, more chance of being paid for their work, etc. - so it was good to be reminded that all artists, regardless of their medium, have problems. I was horrified to discover that the film industry, for example, has taken to releasing films to the public without showing them to the media first - that they are actively discouraging film criticism. What a sad state of affairs. To me, to take such an approach suggests that the studios are well aware that much that they are producing is absolute crud and that they just don't want critics to show it up for the rubbish it is. Of course the films still get reviewed - but not until after that first flush of profits at the box-office.

Some would say that this is just protecting their economic interests - and this is true - film studios are commercial enterprises, after all. Yet somehow I find this totally repellant. Film studios seem to be in a permanent competition to hit the highest number of box-office takings in an opening weekend ever, and the question of art goes entirely out the window. It also means that discerning cinema-goers who don't want to pay good money to watch over-hyped tripe, have to wait several days to either get hold of a review or for other over-eager and possibly gullible souls who've rushed out to the opening screenings to give their opinion. I rarely read cinema reviews myself, I don't go to films much and hate going in the first few days because of the crowds - so why am I so angry about this? I guess because it takes any incentive to produce quality work away - instead studios focus on producing quality marketing, which in my book is largely about hype and to a certain extent deception (as a single example which really annoyed me, posters here for TransAmerica hailed it as "hilarious", but in my view - and djelibeybi agreed with me - it shouldn't even have been billed as a comedy).

Moving on to more specifically musical issues, the author of the classical music criticism section of the article, Paul Kildea, raises an issue noted by Daniel Barenboim in his recent Reith lectures, "In the beginning was sound", which is: why is it that cultured, educated people freely discuss books, art and theatre (and, I would add, film), but rarely of music?

So I was having a think about this, because it's something which has regularly struck me - how so many of my friends who are otherwise civilised and cultured people have bugger-all knowledge of or real interest in music as an artform, and I wonder whether it's because music has become just so much background noise. Pretty much everywhere you go these days, somebody has to fill up the silence with some sort of sound, whether music, muzak or sound effects (e.g. bird calls) - and that's before even considering the din of a hundred iPods on every form of public transport... but that's something I won't go into here for fear of never leaving off!

I can think of very few artforms where great works of art have become nothing but a background to everyday life. Perhaps in the visual arts, where posters of poor old Gustav Klimt's The Kiss proliferate without much thought to the curatorial possibilities of living-room decoration - but even then, many many more people visit art galleries on at least a semi-regular basis - even if it's just the major gallery in their city, or when they travel - than attend concerts of classical music. Perhaps great art has the bonus of frequently being free to view, whereas great performances of great music have a tendency to come with a fairly hefty price tag. Anyway, back to my main argument - we go out to see a film, or sit down to watch it on the telly, we read books as a foreground activity - after all, it's not something that can carry on without us. But of all these, really only music is the only thing that people will start up... and then do the vacuuming.

Classical music is suffering from an appalling lack of understanding among the general populace these days. The frieze article had a great quote along the lines that complimenting a conductor on the accuracy of his ensemble work is like complimenting a bear on his ears - it may be quite correct, but it's not where the focus should be - and this is exactly how the popular approach to classical music strikes me. Classical music is described as "relaxing", "soothing", it's marketed as being ideal music for weddings, something to get your baby to sleep, to seduce that special someone too (in this context I say there should be more Barry White :-). This approach just makes me want to jump up and down to hit somebody - this is art you're talking about, not some manufactured product. Music - even pop music which has a much greater overall audience - is almost never treated like an intellectual exercise the way other artforms are (I'm talking about the general public here, not musicologists, composers, etc. whose job it is to look at it like this) - it's something to make us feel better, not to challenge us, which puts the contemporary composer in a rather awkward position of wanting to make great art, but finding that only pap reaches any sort of audience (notable exceptions do apply, Gorecki's superb Third Symphony being one of them, but I do wonder how many people bought that because they thought it was "relaxing"). Certainly there are pieces of classical music which can be relaxing, but generally these attributes are secondary to what the piece actually is. Gavin Bryars' wonderful The Sinking of the Titanic is a classic example - yes, it is superficially relaxing and soothing, but it's way more than that - it is an exploration in music of the conflicting stories surrounding the sinking of the Titanic, the sacrifice of the ship's orchestra and the music that was played on that night. It is highly evocative of that terrible event, and raises questions - certainly in my mind - about the arrogance of mankind in building an "unsinkable" ship, the terrible loss of life resulting from that arrogance, and the amazing qualities which disaster can bring forth in people. That'a a lot for what could easily be taken - with brain disengaged, as most people's seem to be when dealing with classical music - as a "chillout" piece of music.

The other problem classical music faces, which no doubt contributes to its position as background noise, is that it requires both time and concentration to appreciate. Films and books require these, but you need to follow a plot to "get" a film, and literature by its very nature requires us to focus on it as a foreground activity. You don't have to invest too much time to know whether you're interested in a work of art - you can pass by in a couple of seconds if the (superficial) content or form does not appeal to you - but with music, you need to sit and listen and focus even to find out that much. And contrary to the old chestnut that music is an international language, I would say that classical music is a foreign language to most people. And I'm not just talking about Berio and Schoenberg and other boundary-stretchers. It's like putting on, say, a Russian film and just enjoying the flow of the language, of the cadences and motion, without actually understanding a word that's being said - it takes study to truly comprehend.

Art galleries have three advantages over concert halls: (1) they are generally free (2) you can wander in and out as you like, spend as much or as little time as you like and (3) once you've bought your masterpiece for the gallery, you shove it on the wall and can leave it there as long as you like without incurring any ongoing specific costs for it. I wonder if it would ever be possible to produce a working music gallery. Recordings - and particularly digital recordings - are a certain blessing in that they equate to point (3) which might allow for something like this to become a functioning enterprise. I'm all in favour of live music - I think it can't be beaten - but the problem is that it's expensive as well as time-consuming, and if you don't like it, it feels really really rude to just leave in the middle - it's rude to the performers and disturbs others who may be enjoying it, and of course that lingering feeling that you're not getting your money's worth :-) Buying CDs is similarly not cheap (and not really environmentally sound - all that plastic) if you're not fairly sure you're going to like it. So what about a music gallery, eh? A space equipped with headphones (really good ones which provide sound-proofing both for the person in them and those outside them, none of your iPod earbud rubbish) and comfy chairs, like an enormous lounge. A limited selection of pieces could be made available at any given time, based around a curatorial theme, just like an art gallery, with maybe a few different rooms offering different selections - maybe one room focused on a visiting ensemble's recordings, another on a composer's anniversary, presenting their works in context with other compositions of the era, another looking at a compositional school or style and focusing on its development. Tied in to forthcoming performances, and offering onsite both booking facilities for those performances and sale of MP3s and/or CDs, something like that could have a real impact - could expose people to new sounds and make them take chances with their listening too. Royalty payments could be a bit of a bugger, but with changing "exhibitions" perhaps one-off payments for composers and performers could be negotiated based on the duration of the exhibition. Hmm. It could be cool though - it could be really cool - or it could be a huge flop, music not having the benefit of art's potential appeal to the 10-second attention span. Um.

But that's plenty of food for thought which has been raised for me by this article, although not much that I can see in the way of solutions to current problems. But I guess I should try to pull myself together and not think so much on how music is so hard done by in terms of audiences and funding but just accept that it's different from other artforms and maybe needs to have a new approach thought out. Maybe better just to focus on making it for now: "if you write it they will come"?

The power of threatening inanimate objects

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:33:00 +0000

We've been in our new house for about a month now. And in all that time, I've been unable to compose anything or play the piano at all because during the move all the screws and the lovely solid Stanley screwdriver that came with the piano went missing, so we've been unable to assemble the stand, leaving the keyboard a mere limbless torso sitting on the floor in our bedroom. We hunted and hunted through everything - once, twice, three times - with no luck at all, and in the end, last week I half-resigned myself to needing to order in a new set of screws. So I called Sound Control and spoke to their Roland expert and he gave me the phone number of Spare Parts at Roland. But I wanted to have one more hunt...

So tonight, I walked into the spare room, which has been used as a dumping ground for all the post-move detritus, as well as housing a lot of storage in which various chaotic accumulations of stuff have been put away, and proclaimed in a loud, clear, ringing tone: "I have the number for Roland Spares. If you don't show yourself tonight, I will ring them in the morning and replace you!" I figured it was a bit warm to start pulling things out so went to open the window. To get at the window easily, I needed to move the huge pile of pillows (about 6 pillows!) which the owners had left behind on the main bed when they moved out, plus a spare doona and some other manchestery items. I pushed open the window and as I did so, noticed that a MiniDisc had fallen down beside the cupboard beside the window. I bent down to fetch it, peering as I did into the long thin box that I'd been through twice already... and guess what was poking out at me - yes indeed, a small plastic bag containing a screwdriver and a bunch of piano screws! So you see, threatening inanimate objects really can get you what you want sometimes!

Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:51:00 +0000

One year today! As of this morning, I have been living in England for a whole year - and boy oh boy, what a year it's been!

I've travelled - been to Germany, Belgium (twice), France, Austria, Singapore and Australia, Brighton, Lewes, Bristol, Chester, Oxford, Crew (never again!), Birmingham, Bexhill-on-Sea, the Isle of Wight, and of course Swindon. I don't think I've ever done so much travelling - and certainly not in a single year.

I've made new friends, both in RL and online, and have met up with two of my invisible friends in person

I have lived in three different parts of London, been to the opera four times, the ballet twice, and an assortment of concerts too.

I've missed my parents, but also learned to be more independent. I've started my first self-help book (aargh!) which has been fairly revelatory - something that was most unexpected.

I've written two pieces and received a collaboration request. I've bought a keyboard and a stereo and restarted developing a CD collection - discovered some standard repertoire pieces which has been marvellous - and a DVD collection.

For the first time, I have a really nice set of kitchen knives and have mastered the art of muffin-making (well, with one recipe anyway!). I have baked Le Cookies, madeira cake, cinnamon crumble cake and said muffins, as well as countless old favourites, and have made my own lemonade.

I have discovered that it is possible for me to actually enjoy summer (not so much today though - it was supposed to go to 38 degrees or more!) and that I quite like sunshine and that it is possible to have too much winter. I have experienced my first snowfall and my first proper spring and the artistic revelation which went with that - suddenly absolute reams of poetry, music and painting opened up with new meaning for me.

I have become more adventurous and open to new things - I'm more willing to have a go which has most notably been seen in the fact that I agreed to go on a Segway tour - and saw it through, in spite of falling off twice. Even the world's most evil American president only fell off it once!

I've fallen in love with two new cities - Brussels and Vienna

I've read some great books, the two most recent being Isabel Allende's Zorro and Danny Wallace's Yes man. The latter of these has made me realise how often I turn down invitations, so on Friday I'm going to a karaoke pub with a friend who I've not been particularly helpful to of late

I have scored some awesome bargains in the sales. I have become a Gramophone subscriber and a member of the Tate galleries.

What I haven't done is to spend more time on the travelling - a week in a place rather than a weekend. I haven't overcome my composition block, although I'm working on that. I haven't attempted as many new main course recipes as I've wanted, although I have found two - pork stroganoff with braised rice and lemon-butter fish, both thanks to Gary Rhodes' Keeping it simple - which have made their way into the repertoire. I haven't managed to meet up with Spiralz yet and I haven't been a terribly sociable person all round

I have become a better *ahem* housewife in a small way - I clean up after myself more and keep things generally tidier - which some would say wouldn't be hard.

I'd like to go to more concerts in the next year, to make myself be more motivated both to plan ahead and do more spontaneous stuff. I've been meaning to sign myself up for a course of some sort for the past few months too - I've looked at drawing classes, photography classes, sewing classes and piano classes, but haven't committed to any of them - I think it's time to do that now. The new term should be starting soon, no doubt in September along with the new school year, so it's a good time to choose one and just try it out. I will start looking this week.

So many, many things, just waiting for me to do! Guess I'd better go and start some of them - finding the screws to put the piano together would be a start...

Backtracking in German

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 20:12:00 +0000

Just to backtrack a little, we spent the Easter long weekend in Vienna. Oh my, how glorious was that?? I am absolutely in love with the place, in spite of the Strauss and the Léhar and the Mozart fixations. The architecture is amazing, concerts all over the place and a gorgeous compact little city centre just teeming with shops, everywhere you look. My German, it appears however, is rubbish. I managed one meaningful exchange in the entire weekend which was asking a girl in the supermarket whether the tea I was holding ("Hot Love" *snort* - actually a raspberry and vanilla infusion. mmm) actually had any black tea in it or if it was just fruit. I was quite pleased with that, but seemed to be otherwise unable to ask the simplest thing without dissolving into a muddle of French and English (why?? why??).

The amazing whole-cell link - part 2!

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:43:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I posted a code snippet for "The amazing whole-cell link" stating that it did have a few quirks still, didn't work in Opera, etc.

I've now fixed the problems! And this version should work in all major browsers now, although I still haven't been able to test it on a Mac...

Link this

First up, make your link in the div that you want to be entirely linked:

then do your styles:

And that's all there is to it! Of course, feel free to remove the comments from the code - they're just there to explain what each line does and how to work out the pixel values. Hope it's useful!

New piece

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 23:09:00 +0000

Yay! For the first time in ages, I've actually got a new piece to report: I've just completed my first two-part invention for piano/harpsichord. It's quite Bach-like in places, I think, but without being pastiche. I'm going to let it stew a little while before I release it into the wild, but just felt a need to announce :-) Now I need to start a second one to go with it so it doesn't get lonely...

I love the internet

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:52:00 +0000

Yes I do. I really love the internet. It was my birthday yesterday (33! my God, is it possible that I could be so old and still so immature! (when) will I ever grow up??) and it seems that none of my friends in Australia actually remembered BUT MY INVISIBLE ONLINE FRIENDS DID! Hurrah for invisible friends, hurrah for flickr. So lovely.

So it was quite a low-key birthday - really just a marker of getting older rather than a big celebration, but the boy and I went out for dinner, which made it a small sort of event anyway.

So this morning I had my own mini-celebration by baking some scones. It's been ages since I've made anything like this - and it was also a good excuse to try out my new rolling pin. I've never had a rolling pin without handles before, and I have to say I liked the control it gave me - seemed a bit easier to control than the other, and of course a bit less friction on the hands cos they're not always rubbing against the same bit - the pin rolls along under the length of your hand and you can move them around too. I think £2 well spent :-)

The other thing which really brought home to me how much I love the internet was a story one of my invisible friends told me about how she broke her camera - and her invisible friends clubbed together to buy her a new camera - and gathered so much money that they were able to get her a Nikon D50 AND a tripod and assorted accessories too!

So, like I say, I love the internet and give it a great big hug for being a wonderful place to be :-)

Emerging from my burrow

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 22:36:00 +0000

Tonight I finally got back to the chicken-scratchings (read: notes for a piece) I started on when I first got the digital piano a few weeks ago (interrupted by too much work, then too much dead mouse, then too much anti-work depression) and much to my surprise, I think it's actually heading in some not too hideous direction. But it's becoming too sprawly (after 5 bars) to do very much more at the piano, so tonight I hoiked it into Finale and cleaned it up and adjusted and added another couple of bars. And what a brain-strain that was - haven't really used Finale in - ouch! about a year and a half, so have forgotten how to do, well, pretty much anything. Tomorrow I must print out the list of keyboard shortcuts. Seriously thinking about buying a MIDI interface for the piano very soon too. And a printer so I don't have to keep hassling the poor flatmate. My my, the list of things to purchase just never ends, does it?

Got a new CD over the weekend - the boy bought me the soundtrack to O brother, where art thou, which is one of my favourite films ever, as a belated Valentine's Day gift cos he couldn't be here for the day itself. He's such a sweetie - and he knows me so well :-)

On Sunday I decided to bite the bullet, be brave and go forth and Make New Friends by joining in the London flickr group's February meetup in Islington. I'm very glad I did - they're a fun bunch, and I'll definitely go to more. It was a very grey day, however, but perfect for a bit of an experiment I've been meaning to do for a while now - going monochrome. I decided to spend the day shooting only in monochrome (which on my camera means sepia rather than black & white - I'm not sure why Sony did that...). It was an interesting excercise - I found myself focusing more on textures and contrast more than colours, which gave a whole different way of considering potential subject matter. It was interesting too to see what worked and what didn't. I'll definitely try that again sometime.

Also been doing a bit more cooking, which I've been meaning to be braver about (brave because of lack of beloved KitchenAid heavy-duty stand mixer) and finally tried out one of the recipes in my Dandoy Biscuits cookbook which I brought back from Brussels the last time we were there. I was quite proud of myself really because I pretty much managed to work out the recipe without the aid of a dictionary. I did check a few things, but mostly my guesses were right (the main exception being that what I translated as "a soup spoon" was actually "a tablespoon") so I felt rather chuffed. The recipe I made was "Le cookie" - chocolate chip cookies - and one hell of a mixture, I can tell you - you need muscles like a prize fighter to mix it all up (200g of butter! 400g of assorted sugars! half a kilo of flour!) but it turned out absolutely superb in the end - and so much mixture! I only baked up about a third of it, which made about 20 large cookies, and have frozen the rest in 2 batches to see if it will make good refrigerator cookies. Cross fingers! If it will, that would be awesome because I don't think I have my usual refrigerator cookie recipe here with me. Anyway, fortunately the flatmate is doing sterling work with helping to eat them. I'm just trying not to eat too many... could be fatal!

"You want me to focus? At a time like this??"

Dada a gogo

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:04:00 +0000

Still reading this book on Dada and surrealism (well, I guess that's not too surprising as I only started talking about it yesterday), and into a section where they're talking about contrasting techniques between the two. It's interesting that this book doesn't mention music at all (except for a brief reference to John Cage when talking about chance processes), so I was reading about the different techniques used by Dada artists and having a think about Satie's music and wondering what sort of direct connections can be made between pieces like the Musique d'ameublement and collage techniques. Might have to research this a little further and see what I find.

Odd that there are no composers (that I've ever noticed) connected with surrealism, but I guess their return to more traditional media such as oil painting perhaps was not so conducive to musical creation... then again, maybe the equivalent in music to surrealism was atonalism - new mode of expression, old formal structures... hmm... this requires further thought and research, methinks... probably complete poppycock and I'll be hugely embarrassed to come across this post in the future. Um.

My job is a fish

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 22:30:00 +0000

I hate that I hate my job. Well, I should probably qualify that - I hate 90% of my job, and I hate that the fact that I'm so bored with the 90% I hate that it affects how productive I am in the 10% I actually enjoy. On a positive note, though, I have discovered the source of my dislike, and in so doing have discovered a little something about myself - which is that I don't like wasting my time doing things which in no way improve whatever it is I'm working on.

The 90% project is a classic example because at least 60% of that 90% is spent on fixing things and doing things the long way because the tools which have been developed for us to use don't work properly and somehow it seems impossible for anyone to actually fix them. The remaining 40% sucks because we don't help people to do a better job of their jobs, or make it easier or faster for them to do their jobs - we don't teach them anything, we just change things slightly, thereby ultimately actually making their jobs a little harder.

I don't mind boring work, so long as it improves... something, anything. But boring work that just supports the status quo or even makes it worse for someone just makes me mad. And depressed. Which kills morale. Which means that even though I have two really interesting projects at the moment, I can't pull myself together enough to work on them, even though I want to and they're both for people I admire and (needless to say) will make things better (although possibly not easier :-) for a whole bunch of people.

Here endeth the rant.

I've been wanting to post for a while, but was trying to avoid the rant, but I guess it's better to rant and be done with than to keep bottling up said rant until it becomes a rank rant. Hmm.

*insert quick change of mood in a telephone booth*

I've been reading an awesome book lately which I bought myself at the Tate Modern after perusing their current permanent collection hanging of dada and surrealist work. The book is Dada and surrealism: A very short introduction and is quite an eye-opener. I've known a little bit about both movements and have been fascinated by them for quite some time now, but it's great to see their development and interests placed side by side for comparison.

I wondered when I first started studying Erik Satie why it was that he was involved in dada and not surrealism - his work seemed to match very well with the little I knew about surrealist art that it seemed a bit odd that he didn't follow through. After reading even the introduction to this book, the reason opened right up - after the relative anarchy of dada, surrealism was more of a proper movement, more structured, more rules - everything, in short, that Satie was against. On top of that the book outlines different political agendas, their approaches to publicity and all sorts of apparently peripheral but in reality integral elements to both movements. Fascinating.

I totally love London. I knew I would, but I really, really, really love it in a way that I never could love Sydney, or even Melbourne. I took three days off work the week before last (boy, was that a long time ago) and mostly spent it in art galleries. Day 1 was the Tate Britain (cool Hogarths, awesome Stanley Spencers and interesting Turners), Day 2 the National Gallery (oddly taken with the Degas - I didn't expect that; also my vote for the best hot chocolate in London), Day 3 the Tate Modern. I love that there are three such awesome galleries in the one city (and they're just the big ones!) and that you could spend so many, many hours there. Drop in the droolworthy V&A and the British Museum on top of that and you might never emerge.

One thing that particularly amazed me was the fact that the Tate Modern are in the process of rehanging their permanent collection - they're actually rotating the artworks so you see different things they have in their vaults! I don't think the AGNSW have done this since the dawn of time - every time I go it's the same Jeffrey Smart (don't get me wrong, I adore Jeffrey Smart), the same Robert Klippel (if you've been, you'll know the one - the wooden lady in the tub of spikes), the same bits and pieces over and over again. Thank God for the temporary exhibits. But I guess this also explains why I never went very often.

So I got all worked up and ended up buying myself some art materials - some aquarelle pencils (because often in museums you either can't take photos or can only take them without the flash) and some lovely charcoal pencils which were on sale. Unfortunately, these sorts of purchases only lead to Attempts at Art. Oh dear.

Why have 63 people looked at this in the 4 days since I posted it? Why have 2 people I don't really know very well faved it? Why?? Why???

I also bought books of walks, which I am wont to do from time to time. I took the boy out into the country to do the Cookham walk, which brings me to another reason why I love London - for the princely sum of £9 and an hour's travel (if you don't count the hour we had to wait in Maidenhead), we were entirely out of the city and walking across fields of turnips, looking at cows and wide open countryside, then deep into woods and far from anything. Absolutely amazing. We saw Stanley Spencer's house on our way through Cookham, but got hopelessly lost at the end of the wood because the path had changed and we had to go in a completely different direction. All marvellously enjoyable though, and we ended up in Marlow (not even on the map in the book :-) where we had a delicious pub dinner (parsnip & cheese soup, followed by steak & chips. mmmm) and hopped back on the train to London. Nothing like this exists in Australia - everything's too far spread out - both the cities and the countryside - to walk from one village to another in Australia is an all day hike, in general - here it's a gentle stroll of an hour. Just glorious. Ahhhh!

The amazing whole-cell link

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:44:00 +0000

I'm thinking I should post more code snippets here because the number of clever JavaScript things I worked out in my last job was considerable, but because they were all stored in our inhouse knowledgebase, they all got lost when I left. Silly me without the forward-planning whatsit.

So, here's the latest. It's not quite done yet (still doesn't work well in Opera) but I'm going to come back and work on that and see if I can't get it to function properly there too. What you are about to see is...

Update, 25 April 2006: I've now fixed the code to be cross-browser across all the major browsers around at the moment. Find the updated code in "The amazing whole-cell link - part 2"

The amazing whole-cell link

To start with, here's what it does (unless you're browsing with Opera, in which case it doesn't):

Link this

First up, make your link in the div that you want to be entirely linked:

then do your styles:

So there you go. I haven't been able to test it on a Mac at all, so could be oddness there - if you find that, please let me know which browser & version and I'll add it to my testing list for when I get access to a Mac.

Getting old

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 19:15:00 +0000

I think I must be getting old. I've gone all standard-repertoire on myself. We went to Paris and I brought home... Mendelssohn. Last week there were a bunch of new music concerts on here and I didn't feel like going to any of them. Now I'm actually considering buying the complete string quartets of Beethoven on CD in the HMV sale. Factor in that I actually enjoyed a Mahler concert the other week and I think those of you who know me will probably be pretty seriously concerned.

But fear not, I think I'm actually coming out of a hole in the ground - I feel like I'm waking up after a year-and-a-half-long coma (a year and a half being the time since I last actually wrote anything at all). I'm loving my new stereo and have been revelling, not only in Mendelssohn but in tons of Vaughan Williams (the boy's sister gave me 2 RVW CDs for Christmas, both of which are wonderful) and the piano concertos of a chap called Pitfield of whom I had never heard but I think is a bit of a find - kind of RVW meets Poulenc and Ravel, so very much my sort of thing.

New Year was wonderful - we spent it in Paris and while we completely failed at most of the traditional sightseeingy things, we did get in a LOT of walking, used my new monopod, experienced a proper snowfall and, of course, ate ourselves silly. And spent New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysées.

Now the boy has started his new job and travels to Swindon every week. I got him back for the weekend, but it was very hard to send him off this morning. At least I've got a bear to keep me company now, but it's not quite the same. Oh well, another reason to look forward to weekends :-)

Christmas is coming...

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:09:00 +0000

... the goose is getting fat, etc. and so forth.

Finally everything seems to be falling properly into place for Christmas - there's a nip in the air and it no longer seems strange to be singing things like 'In the bleak mid-winter' cos it's 35 degrees outside. HURRAH!

We started our Christmas shopping proper last night - bought a tree and some wrapping paper and little angels playing instruments (not in a tacky "rockin' santa" kind of way though, I hasten to assure you) and a small starter-assortment of pressies for people who are mostly far away. Have to finish those off this weekend because the postal deadline for Australia is 9 December - don't think I'll ever have been done with the pressies so early!

We've already received an exciting assortment of parcels from the colonies which we'll be arranging under our new tree this weekend

And of course - the very best part of Christmas - the carols have come out. I have two new CDs here which I obtained with a copy of Classic FM magazine (which really is the Women's Weekly of classical music, but much fun) - one of 'Christmas classics' which is very enjoyable - Christmas concertos, bits of choral works and so on; the other is carols and which I broached for the first time today. Some very nice bits and pieces on there, but the Oxford Cantata have got "Gaudete" all wrong - obviously nobody has ever told them that this particular piece MUST be sung in a broad Australian accent: "GOW-DAY-TAY". It's not right sung all posh and Latin :-\ but heigh ho. I'm sure I'll live. And I'm sure there'll be plenty of other carols and other Christmassy works to make up for deficiencies in Gaudete - Emma Kirkby singing the Messiah, for example...

Hurrah for the history channel

noreply@blogger.com (minim) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 11:21:00 +0000

I've come down with a hideous cold this week. It flared up on Sunday and I should have spent the whole day in bed, except that we were in Bristol so it wasn't really an option. We went to see the Wallace and Gromit exhibition instead:

We also dropped in on a John Cage exhibition on the way - very cool - including some fabulous realisations of Fluxus pieces. Funny how I never understood any of this experimental stuff till I took Shannon's class earlier this year - couldn't tell the difference between what was valid sound art and what was merely a pretentious waste of time. Glad I can now - Alvin Curran's piece for stones was particularly lovely. I wished I could have got hold of a recording, but the boy was keen to move on and I was feeling cruddy, so we bypassed the shop on the way out. Oh well, maybe I'll get back there before the exhibition closes in mid-January.

Anyway, so at home and all tucked up with a box of tissues, a garlic bagel and a teddy bear today (as yesterday) and cheering for the history channel. Daytime TV everywhere is always so dismal, but now we have freeview, so instead of being forced to choose between Judge Judy and staring at the walls, I got to watch 7 episodes in a row of Meet the Ancestors - so much better for the brain. So hip hip hooray for the history channel. I wonder what they've got on today...